Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of mental structures, or things which exist in the mind. Meaning that it is philosophy not of what objectively exists in the world, but of what mental structures it is we perceive from our subjective angle. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience. Contrasted against noumena, the idea of things in themselves. The term "phenomenology" is derived from the Greek "phainomenon", meaning "appearance". Hence it is the study of appearances as opposed to reality, and as such has its roots back in Plato's Allegory of the Cave and his theory of Platonic Idealism. Phenomenology was coined on the assumption that metaphysics of the world not only presupposes too much claim to objectivity, but also tends to disregard that just as important as world metaphysics are attempts to apply that same logic to the structure of mind. Because it is from the subjective view that people ultimately perceive reality. And so when trying to understand the human condition, it is this basis of the mental world that in many ways can more accurately describe it than the external world. Phenomenology was created based on the idea that this had previously been something not properly explored. While aspects of it had been explored for a long time, it became defined more as a distinct topic starting with the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. They founded it with the idea that it would be the foundation of all philosophy, due to experience being the basis of all further human processes to knowledge. experience, in a phenomenological sense, includes not only the relatively passive experiences of sensory perception, but also imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition and action. In short, it includes everything that we live through or perform. What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it. However, as Heidegger has pointed out, we are often not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action, and the domain of Phenomenology may spread out into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity. Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. Phenomenology thus posits that qualia or experiences must be approached in part from the first person view, as it may be totally incomprehensible to try to characterize experiences one has no personal experience with. So while the study of the external objective structure was already a thing, it was a radical revolution in thought to establish the need to study the structure of the mental as well. From an internal first person perspective referring to mental objects and qualia. Because these, ant the intuitions related to external topics are an important basis for understanding how humans obtain knowledge, and what structures are actually occuring when knowledge is obtained. Classical phenomenologists practiced three main methods. These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades, such as comparing their aspects with neuroscience. 1: Describe a type of experience just as you find it in our own (past) experience. Thus, create pure description of lived experience. 2: Interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. Thus it relates to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. 3: Analyze the form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical phenomenologists practiced analysis of experience, factoring out notable features for further elaboration. One example used to highlight aspects of phenomenology is that if you planned to meet a friend somewhere, but the friend never shows up you can feel the absence of them at that location. Because of this, it says that their absence is something that exists, at least for you. This is because this absence despite in a physical sense not referring to anything refers to mental content that deliberately highlights something that is compared against another possible state. It exists because you can feel it. As such, the subjective world is based on these relations and contexts that have relational elements that are based on the flow of your unfolding experiences more than just what tangibly exists. And this distinction is important for contextualizing the world from humanity's perspective. Phenomenology's relation to psychology is a little ambiguous. While its aspects are a bit different, due to being about the subjective mental structures, but approached from an almost metaphysical angle, it does have heavy crossover, and in fact was originally referred to as descriptive psychology, before branching off into its own field. Different figures have different views on whether it still has unique use as a studied field, or whether it should work more closely with psychology, or whether psychology superseded entirely. Aspects of phenomenology are still studied heavily, often either as part of another tradition that it influenced, such as existentialism, structuralism, and post structuralism, or independently. Though it began in the continental tradition, it's influence had spread out and is now studied by those in the analytical tradition, or comes in versions that are mixed with psychology or neuroscience that are referred to as heterophenomenology or neurophenomenology. Due to the need for study of the mind to understand the nature of the first person perspective. Some philosophers like dan denett however have criticized phenomenology's first person approach, saying it is incompatible with a scientific third person approach. The line of thought established by phenomenology is a large aspect of the megaten series. Megaten is based heavily around the fact that the world you experience is shaped by your perspectives, and that this is in a sense literal because the world of experience is not identical to the world of the sciences. Phenomenology was also a large influence on existentialism and the application of the idea of values and life narrative to this line of thought. German idealism or post-kantianism is the tradition that existed as a precursor to phenomenology. It began as a reaction to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and kant's declaration that while we can understand and process phenomena as they appear to us, we can't know anything about noumena, which is the objects of the world as they exist in themselves. This being based on the fact that while we can understand their relational qualities as they relate to us, we may have no way of knowing their fundamental self-nature. This tradition that highlighted the world as it stems from human perception ultimately led to the tradition of phenomenology, and its focus on starting one's work from the subjective view of the individual. Life-world, German Lebenswelt, in Phenomenology, the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sciences. What this means is that the "world" that one lives in is not that of objective reality, but mediated through the lens of experience. This is not merely something that happens due to a lack of full knowledge, but an inherent aspect of experience. For instance, color does not exist as an objective facet of objects. It is a code invented by your brain to help maneuver environments, rather than an aspect of objects themselves. Based on the patterns of light particles that bounce off of them. But you would say that the "world" you exist in has color, because it is a world of experience. There are other examples as well. How objects are defined, or what their meaning is is something within your experience. Certain shapes are only a chair because either you or society deems it to be so. Forks are forks. If there were no humans, none of these things would have meaning. While your life world is personal, there is also an intersubjective element in which it aspects are passed from person to person. This has alienating affects because even your perception of other people is not based on objectivity, but mediated both by your perspectives and their presentation. This also ties to the idea of the jungian persona, and what aspects of one's self people choose to project outwards. These things are conveyed and in the telling become part of someone else's life-world, but do not perfectly reflect the nature of one's being, giving an aspect of alienation from others, and the reality that one's world is in a sense one's own. This has tangible affects even in terms of psychology. Two people living in the same space may literally perceive it as two different "worlds" based on the experience they bring to it. Because the worlds they exist in are not the abstract meaningless worlds of science, but literally only exist in the intelligible form in their perception. Someone with bad memories of a place, or a different life regarding it can see it entirely differently. This is a direct basis of the megaten series. At the end of persona 5 morgana explains the basis of what the game calls cognition. That there is no objective "real" world, because the real world in the sense of what people normally mean by world is the world as how you perceive it, rather than the abstract lifeless data. This is also tied to the concept of observation in the main series, which is meant as an equivalent concept to cognition. In-game observation tangibly changes aspects of reality by controlling what gods are born. And since these beings represent worldview, and can change the world itself, it is showing a feedback loop between perception, and the lifeless data that underlies it. The fact that the world is shaped by your perception, and that this has tangible connotations crosses over to the ideas of religious existentialism, and the fact that people's spiritual paradigms are entrenched within these aspects of perception. The games are presenting these religious paradigms not as false, but as touching on true facts about reality, while also being shaped based on structure influenced by the human mind itself. Religious existentialis such as that of paul tillich often talking about how god is the ground of being, and our perceptions of god are based on our relations to it. Which is something heavily shaped by us. Interestingly this idea actually has religious parallels in buddhism. In buddhism, your mind is said to shape both your nature and your reality. And different beings are said to exist in tangibly different worlds, even in the same reality. In some interpretations, a human can stand by a river. But if a preta / ghost were to stand by this same river they would see it as a river of blood. And if a god were to stand by it, they would see it as a river of sweet nectar. In essence these are different worlds, because your perception shapes what the meaning of the structures of reality are to you. Note the similarities of this to game plots like that of silent hill 2. For this reason, many have said that buddhism has close parallels with phenomenology. And the kyoto school was based heavily on comparing and contrasting these traditions, and importing phenomenological interpretations to the east, mixed with a uniquely east perspective, but to be more applicable to a modern understanding. Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather refers to a "stretching out" of consciousness towards its object. However, it should be noted that it is warned not to think that there is some preexisting consciousness that then stretches out to an object, but rather consciousnessness is in itself created by stretching to a particular thought or object. Whether this object is a particular thought, or a tangible experience is considered irrelevant to the concept of intentionality itself. This means that the object of consciousness doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception: it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory, or abstract thought. Intentionality is an important concept to approach the concept of mind to, saying that mind always in essence is based in specific content. Noema is a term for the object or content of a thought, judgment, or perception. Or in other words the thing the intentionality is oriented to. Note that this refers not to the object in the absolute sense, but as it appears in our consciousness. Noesis is the thing done to the object. Such as perceiving, loving it or hating it, etc. By extension Noema and noesis are always seen as coming paired together. Since every thought has both an object or content, and what is being done with it. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position. In phenomenology it refers to the experience of another human body as if it were yourself, and thus seeing it as another subject merely than an object. Phenomenology notes that this can only be done by relating to it with experiences understood from your own first person point of view, and will require some form of projection. One of the goals is understanding the phenomenological structures in order to be able to better do this. Note that although this has become a more well known and used word in english in general, it was actually created in the philosophical traditions to help encapsulate these concepts. Intersubjectivity refers to shared mental states or understandings held by multiple people. It is often seen as something that must be done right as a goal in order to understand the experiences of another. The concept of the intersubjective is to add another realm between the subjective and the objective, highlighting that many ideas exist in the shared experiences of many, rather than in only the mind of one. Megaten relates this idea of intersubejctivity to religious existentialism, with gods literally being empowered by the intersubjective thoughts that create a flow of magnetite to them. Dasein refers to the experience of being that is particular to human beings. It contrasts with being in itself, where an object simply is. And translates to “being there,” or "being in the world" implicating a perceiving entity existing in a place, and capable of asking questions of being and relation to other things. While it highlights human existence, the term is meant to exist to not inherently encompass the properties we consciously think of related to humans in particular, instead referring only to the fact of this self aware existence. Heidegger noticed that many would ask philosophical questions like "what is good," but glossed over the more fundamental question of "what is is" or "what does it mean for something to be." For Heidegger, the first step to understand 'Being' (or 'is') is to understand what kind if beings we are (Being-there, i.e. situated, contextualised beings) and what kind of being we do - i.e. Being-in-the-World. The rest of his philosophy follows from this. Heidegger's point is that Dasein (i.e. human beings), although we can consider them in terms of their present-at-hand properties or features, primarily exist, not in terms of actuality, but in terms of possibility. Human existence, for Heidegger, should be understood in terms of possible ways of being, not in terms of actually present features that we can list. Dasein is unique from other entities insofar as other entities are typically described cateogorically according to a list of properties. That labels what they are. Whereas dasein is what makes you able to ask -who- someone is. It is about possibility, and shows that human existence necessarily exists in process. Like a lot of philosophers before him, Heidegger reasoned that all these questions of what things existed had one thing in common, besides their form. They were all asked (and answered) by the same kind of creature - a human. And the asking of these questions, as well as the ability to ignore for so long the more foundational question of being he wanted to ask, suggests that these human beings had - and took for granted - a kind of implicit understanding of what it is to be. Unlike many of the philosophers before him, however, he didn't think (as the Rationalist philosophers) that this understanding came just from having a mind - like pre-installed software in a computer - or on the other hand (like the empiricists) just from having experience of the world (like a camera). Instead, Heidegger thought having a rational mind exposed to the world through a particular kind of body made a human Being a special kind of Being - Dasein, or "Being-there", which was crucially capable of a special kind of engagement - Being-in-the-World. This concept would go on to influence heavily religious paradigms which would talk about the distinctions between beings and being. In relation to the power of being, or the nature of what it is "to be" that upholds individual beings within reality. This is a large part of the radical theology of paul tillich who holds that god is in essence the power of being, and that one's religious views were different ways of relating to being, and the creation of different existential structures to make sense of it. He further argued that time and human existence were inextricably linked, and that we as humans are always looking ahead to the future. Thus, he argued, being is really just a process of becoming, leading him to totally reject the Aristotelian idea of a fixed human essence. The concept of Dasein was inspired by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe the nature of taoist philosophy and its focus on you as a being in the world, and how the taoist absolute is in essence its manifestation in the relative. In general, aspects of his thought are compared heavily with taoism and zen, due to their focus on direct experience and insight and being within reality. lived body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you are being touched). The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity is the basis of how to approach objectivity. Due to your perceptions alone having no inherent verification of being more than subjective.